A Harvard professor best known for his prolific and popular writings on science and evolution, Gould focused his keen insight on baseball in numerous articles about the sport he loved.
Gould attacked the issue of why .400 hitters had virtually disappeared from baseball. Rather than a sign of poor hitting, as Ted Williams, the last player to hit .400 in a full season, has argued, Gould reasoned their absence was evidence that the game had evolved to a such a high level that few if any hitters could reach the magic .400 mark.
His logic is simple. As the level of the worst players in the majors has risen over the years, it has become impossible for individuals to tower over the game the way they did 75 years ago, when a batter hitting .400 might not be the biggest news of the season.
While league batting averages have remained extremely steady over the years, fielding percentages have gradually improved and the batting averages of pitchers have dropped through the floor.
Improved fielding, he argued, makes hits that more unlikely, while the plate production of pitchers reflects a constant in the game. While there are still a few pitchers who could really hit, there used to be a number of pitchers, such as Bob Gibson or Don Drysdale in the 1960s, who were more dangerous at the plate than some regulars who earned their living with their bats and gloves rather than their fastballs.
Drysdale was often the Dodgers' most effective pinch hitter through, something unheard of in the majors these days.
Gould hypothesized that pitchers' offensive production had decreased relative to position players, not because pitchers are poorer athletes than they used to be, but because base hits, except in Colorado Rockies home games, are harder to get now and pitchers are not evaluated based on their ability to hit.
Because the quality of the worst-hitting position players in the league has steadily risen, it is harder for a few batters to dominate batting stats the way Ted Williams did.
As a lifetime Yankees fan, Gould was also passionate, as many still are, on the subject of Joe DiMaggio's record 56-game hitting streak. Gould concluded that the streak was something purely beyond the realm of luck and thus an achievement of the highest order, an accolade he never got a chance to bestow on the next .400 hitter.
Although he may not have touched on the subject of Ichiro Suzuki and Kazuhiro Sasaki, Gould's conclusions in work unrelated to baseball suggested that players from another less competitive league were quite capable of being stars in the majors.
He wrote that people see a vast array of differences between individuals within a population, such as the difference in production between Barry Bonds and Tsuyoshi Shinjo, and wrongly assume that similar differences exist between different populations.
The notion that different populations of human beings have fundamentally different abilities and potentials is the illogic that underpins racial discrimination.
Until Hideo Nomo broke through in 1995, few baseball people on either side of the Pacific thought it possible for a Japanese player to be a major league star. It was felt that Japanese baseball was less competitive because Japanese players, as a population, were not as good.
Even after Nomo succeeded, there were those who called it a fluke.
Nomo success was due to his guts, wrote one journalist here, implying that other Japanese stars lacked this necessary quality.
But faced with a flood of evidence to the contrary, people began to re-think their original beliefs on major league supremacy. Some American "baseball people" began to say that many Japanese pitchers are as good as those in the majors, while ignoring the implication that since pitchers don't dominate the leagues here there must be some quality hitters as well.
Some of the people who followed this line probably still believe that every major league player is superior to every minor league player--by virtue of the labels we place on them.
Ichiro's success was astonishing only to those, in Japan and the States, who believed he couldn't be as good as an average major league outfielder because success in the inferior context of Japanese baseball meant nothing.
Gould's book "The Mismeasure of Man," is strongly recommended for its underlying truth that you can't know what someone is capable of just by knowing where they are from.
As enriching as his musings on baseball were, they make up just a tiny fraction of Gould's work, much of which good reading as well as enlightening.
Forget Shoeless Joe Jackson. Gould is the one who deserves to be in Cooperstown.
The Hot Corner appears each Thursday in The
Daily Yomiuri .